The Pushbutton Cornucopia
(See Cover)
At 5:30 one frosty Indiana morning last week. Farmer Warren North, 45, rolled out of bed to get at his chores. After a hearty breakfast (orange juice, cereal, bacon and eggs), he left his twelve-room white frame and fieldstone house, walked briskly to the barnyard. In the early morning mist the low-lying white barn, surmounted by five giant blue-black silos, rode the frozen prairie like an ocean liner. Like a rumble of surf came the hungry bellowing of 400 white-faced Herefords and the grunting of 500 Hampshire hogs, waiting at row on row of troughs to be fed. In the barn. North stepped up to an instrument panel as intricate as a ship's, began pushing buttons and pulling switches. All around, the barn came to vibrant life. From one silo dropped ground corn, from another silage, from a third shelled corn.
By pushing other buttons. Farmer North shot in supplementary vitamins, mineral and hormone nutrients. Then he cut in the big noisemaker. In a channel in front of the silos a snakelike auger began to turn. As it writhed, it propelled the feed up a steep incline and sent it tumbling out through a conduit that passed directly over 330 feet of feed troughs. At regular intervals, trap doors automatically distributed the individual animal's feed. When all the animals on one side of a trough had been fed, the traps changed position, shunted feed to the animals waiting on the other side.
Ten minutes later, Farmer North was through with a job that would have taken five men half a day working with buckets and pitchforks. He was ready to indulge his hobby. He returned to his farmhouse and poured himself another cup of coffee. While it cooled, he read a story on the "farm problem" in the Wall Street Journal. Carrying his cup and a cigarette, he walked into his living room, 40 feet long and beige-carpeted wall to wall. It was dominated at the far end by a two-story pipe organ flanked by two electronic organs and a grand piano. Farmer North sat down at the console, and after running through a few warm-up chords and arpeggios, began to play Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.
Symbol & Example. Farmer North is a symbol--and a prime example--of the profound changes that have been wrought in U.S. agriculture by mechanization and automation, plus the new use of fertilizers. In the last 20 years, farming has changed more radically than in the previous two centuries. Once farmers used to dole out fertilizer thinking only of how much it cost them. Now they pour it on by the carload, confident of getting back bigger profits at harvest time. Farm use of fertilizer has risen in 20 years from 1,500,000 tons to 6,200,000 tons. To handle the huge increase in crops, farmers have had to mechanize almost every farm job. From 1938 to 1958, farmers more than trebled their ownership of tractors, to 4,700,000 (an average1 1/2 per commercial farm). Since 1945, they have increased their number of newer work-saving machinery by 1,200%--mostly with machines that had not even been invented in 1938. Farmers have invested $17.5 billion in 1,040,000 combines, 745,000 cornpickers, 590,000 pickup hay balers, 255,000 field forage harvesters and other machinery. They spend $1.5 billion for gasoline and oil each year just to keep the equipment going.
Now farmers are taking the big step from mechanization to automation in the raising of animals and fowl; they are copying the assembly-line techniques of industry and bringing animals indoors. Once man felt he could not provide an environment for animals as good as nature's. Now he knows he can do a whole lot better. Behind him, giving him confidence, are ever-new discoveries in antibiotics, hormones, climate control, nutrition and plant and animal genetics.
Failure & Scandal. The result of all this is that farm productivity is soaring at a rate that once nobody believed possible. From 1938 through 1957, overall farm labor productivity rose at an annual average rate of 4.7% (v. 2.2% for the rest of the economy). Even more significant, productivity is increasing at an accelerating rate. Last year, it jumped 8%, as much as the increase for the decade 1920-30. This technological fact, ignored by the politicians, is what has made the farm-support program such a failure and scandal. Last year, with farmers paid $620 million to put land in the soil bank, the planted acreage was reduced to the smallest since 1919. But the yield was 11% greater than in the previous record year of 1957. This year, in many crops, the U.S. is headed for even bigger surpluses. The 1959 wheat harvest was forecast last week at 1.2 billion bu. This will add 200 million bu. to the record 1.3 billion bu. wheat carryover expected this July1. With productivity shooting up like the kudzu vine, even veteran farm lobbyists are beginning to wonder if any kind of a subsidized farm program can be anything but a failure and scandal.
In the Box. For Farmer North, the revolution in farming came at precisely the right time. Twenty years ago Warren North could not afford a pair of new work shoes; he did his chores in an overshoe and a boot. Today, by taking full advantage of all the scientific advances, plus an amount of hard work that would have broken a weaker man, North is comfortably a millionaire. But he remembers every struggling step of the way up. Born in 1913 on the farm he now owns, near Brookston (pop. 1,100), in northwest Indiana, North started in field work at the age of seven, the year after his mother died. His father bolted a box to a harrow, and North, riding in the box. drove the team. His father followed, driving another team pulling a corn planter.
At nine, North was experienced enough to work in the fields alone. Life around Brookston was grim for all farmers in those days after the collapse of prices following the World War I boom, and it was harsh at the North farm. Dale North, the father, was not satisfied unless everybody got up at 3:30 to milk, eat and harness up, so they could get into the fields by 5:30. The cheerless life in Widower North's house still troubles Warren North: "We never even had a Christmas tree." By 1930 the father saw the way clear to let Warren's twin sister Wanda go off to teachers college. Warren himself was ready to go away in three months, study the organ for a term, then enter engineering school the following fall.
All this changed when Dale North had a heart attack. Before he died, he told Warren: "Get an education. Don't be a farmer. I wish I hadn't been." The death left Warren North alone at 17 with an $8,500 mortgage on the 180 acres, $1,500 in funeral and other personal debts. He could go away, let the farm go in a forced sale to satisfy the debt. Or he could stay and try to salvage something. He decided to stay: "I was young and strong," he says now with a slow smile. "And I already had done the spring plowing."
Ten-Cent Dates. Of the next four years, Warren North remembers little except being bone-weary at all times. His father had got up at 3:30. He got up at 1:30 to milk and set the cans out on the road for the creamery that paid him 2$-c- a quart. He had to cut his luxuries t010-c- a week for old Buffalo roll-your-own tobacco. On his rare dates, he limited the evening to a dime--"for two Cokes." Such ruthless self-denial paid off financially. Warren not only kept Wanda in school but paid off the $1,500 of his father's personal debts to close the estate so he and Wanda could legally inherit the 180 acres.
The years left scars. Withdrawn to begin with, Warren became more so. He married three times. He and his third wife separated six years ago. He found consolation in music, the farm and religion; a Baptist, he has long been organist for the Federated Church. The more unlucky he was in love the more his daring touch with farming coined gold. He was one of the first in Indiana to use fertilizer on wheat, pioneered with hybrid corn in 1937. His yield rose from 50 bu. to 65 bu. and ultimately 100 bu. per acre. He made up his own mind. When the experts said Russian hard wheat would not grow in his area, he planted Russian hard wheat. His yield went from 30 bu. to 42 bu. per acre.
Bigger & Bigger. He developed a passion for the latest in machinery. He bought his first tractor in 1933 for $550. Gradually he went in for bigger and more expensive models. By 1950 he was paying $3,000 for a tractor. Later he paid $4,800 apiece for three more. In 1952 he bought a $5,500 combine, decided he had made a good deal when the price rose to $8,000. He early realized that to make costly equipment pay he had to have more land to operate it more of the time. He bought Wanda's 90 acres, partly to save the land from going to another buyer, inherited 25 acres from his grandmother. The rest he picked up at steadily rising market prices from other farmers. Year by year he mortgaged and paid off, mortgaged and paid off. Gradually his property line stretched out to enclose 300 acres, then 500, then two years ago 41 ,000 acres of the finest land in northern Indiana--worth $500 an acre. When his land got ahead of his equipment, he switched from four-blade to six-blade plows to cut plowing time by one third.
By 1957 Warren North had all the land he wanted. The question was how he could best use it. He was selling grain and feeding hogs and some cattle. He decided that raising grain did not pay enough and that he had to go in for mass production of livestock, use all his grain for his own animals. Through the years North had kept a tight rein on his wage outlay. He employed only two year-round hired hands, plus two part-time men in summer. But the going wage in his area had gone up from $100 to $180 a month, plus a house, utilities, etc. "I figured even if I could get more men they would not be any account."
The Drive to Automate. For the same reason that inspired many an industrialist faced with similar cost-price squeeze, North decided to automate his livestock feeding, bought glass-lined steel Harvestore silos, developed by the A. O. Smith Corp. of Milwaukee, Wis., for $55,000. Hermetically sealed to prevent decay, the silos permitted him to store corn and silage as soon as cut, thereby giving it all the feed value of green produce. Since the corn did not have to be dried to bone hardness as in ordinary storage, it would also be easily digestible. (Around Warren North, in a more primitive cycle, many farmers still followed the traditional and inefficient practice of feeding dried corn to cattle, running in hogs to pick out undigested kernels from the manure, then letting chickens clean up.)
North spent another $75,000 on equipment to go with the silos. The result is that he can swiftly raise his livestock feeding output without more capital. By turning his animals over three times a year, he is already running at the rate of 1,200 head of cattle, 1,500 hogs a year. Depending on the market outlook, he can increase this to 1,800 cattle and 4,000 hogs with no additional labor.
Last year Prairie Farmer, the leading midwestern farm magazine (circ. 415,000), was so impressed by North that it held its annual farm progress show on his farm. Two hundred tents were set up. In two days 215,000 visitors tramped over the place to see how he does it. Said Jim Thomson, managing editor of Prairie Farmer: "North is one of America's great farmers." Actually, what Warren North has done is also being done by many another:
RUSSELL CASE, 36, who 20 years ago helped his father and grandfather operate a scrubby 100-acre place, now has two farms totaling 2,500 acres near West Mansfield, Ohio. It takes eight mobile radios to keep the two dozen trucks, 19 tractors, six combines and assorted other mechanical gear shuttling back and forth to harvest crops worth $150,000.
C. E. BENZEL cultivates an 180-acre irrigated farm outside Alliance, Neb. which last year produced 625 tons of beet sugar. Using the latest in mechanical planters, thinners and harvesters, Benzel and six helpers do the work of 30 migratory workers.
BILL FARR has just installed an automated $200.000 feed mill, 100 ft. high and 60 ft. long, to prepare food for the 10,000 cattle he fattens on his feed lots near Greeley, Colo. Truckloads of corn, barley, dry beet pulp, dehydrated alfalfa, protein mix, etc. are ground and mixed into eight different types of feed to give the maximum weight gain to cattle at different age levels. In addition to antibiotics and minerals, Farr also adds tranquilizers to make the animals eat more, avoid threshing around and bruising their flesh en route to the slaughterhouse.
Corn the Key. If any single event can be said to have touched off the farm revolution, it was the development of hybrid corn. It opened the eyes of farmers and scientists alike to the vast increase that could be made in food production. Following Mendelian genetic principles, Professor George Harrison Shull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington developed the first hybrid corn in 1908. This was more than mere crossing: by generations of inbreeding he got pure strains which when mated yielded an almost explosive yield increase given the name of "hybrid vigor." But Shull's work was commercially valueless; the seed was too expensive. Not till 1935, after further discoveries by U.S. Department of Agriculture Researcher Donald Jones and commercial seedsmen, such as Henry A. Wallace, onetime (1933-40) U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, could commercial seed companies put hybrid corn on the market.
Last year U.S. farmers seeded 90% of their corn acreage with hybrid corn, got a total yield of 3.4 billion bu.--750 million bu. higher than they could have produced with regular corn. The wonders of hybrid corn are still surprising the scientists. For example, last year Illinois Farmer James Holderman decided to try a new type of hybrid corn, even though the experts warned him it was not suitable for his land. He doubled the amount of fertilizer, planted the rows closer together, and his yield jumped to 175 bu. an acre, compared to an average 70 bu. The corn was so thick that his mechanical picker just barely got through it. Now corn experts are studying Holderman's experiment to see exactly what happened--and if it should be recommended to everyone.
At the University of Illinois, Associate Professor Earl R. Leng has developed a dwarf corn that he hopes will some day end farmers' worries from windstorm damage. The short stalk is also ideal for automated pickers. By crossing his dwarf corn with teosinte, a Mexican grass, he has also developed a stalk with 20 small ears all along the stalk. If he can increase the size of the ears, the corn of 1965 may well resemble a hat tree.
Genetic Freaks. Corn is a hybridizer's delight because its male part (the tassel) and its female part (the immature ear) are separate on the plant and can easily be hand pollinated. Most other crops have their male and female parts close together. The long-sought key to separation of the sexes in order to hybridize other commercial crops came accidentally with the discovery of patches of sorghum that had hereditary male sterility. From this seedsmen developed a hybrid. This year the U.S. is planting 8,000,000 acres to hybrid sorghum for feed--half the entire sorghum crop--although the hybrid is only five years old. This started hybridizers hunting for other genetic freaks with hereditary male sterility. Researcher Frank Eaton of die U.S. Agriculture Department, working at Texas A. & M., found a chemical key that may unlock all the closed doors. Eaton noted that a weed killer, lightly applied, sterilized the male stamens of cotton, left the more protected female pistil apparently unhurt. If this means what hybridizers hope it means, it may be the key to hybridizing all crops--and vastly increasing their yield.
The Machine Mother. What is happening in corn and other crops can be matched in animals and fowl. One of the pioneer researchers was Dr. E. Parmalee Prentice, a son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller. In the 19205, at his farm in Massachusetts, many strains were combined to produce the superior White Leghorn, now the basic egg-laying hen in the U.S. Today some 30 hatcheries specialize in producing laying pullets, have helped to push U.S. yearly egg production per hen up from 134 in 1940 to 200 in 1958.
The demand for the more prolific egg layer has required more and more automation. Near Atlanta, Ga., Layer Breeder Roy Durr produced 500,000 chickens last year trying to keep up with orders for layers. He puts the eggs in special incubators that vastly improve on the maternal solicitude of real hens. A hen often forgets to turn her eggs (causing the membrane lining to adhere to the shell and killing the fetus), or in hot dry weather leaves the nest and lets them dry out. Durr's mechanical mother turns each egg every hour, and when a thermometer warns that the relative humidity is too low. shoots in a fine spray of water. Durr staggers the eggs, in each incubator, because from the 16th day until the 21st, when the chick breaks through the shell, a hatching chicken gives off heat, thereby thriftily helps incubate the eggs put in later. This way Durr has to turn on the electricity only about 75% of the time.
The laying pullets are sold to other farmers who do nothing but produce eggs for the table in a completely automatic fashion. The hens are kept in individual cages. They stick their heads out to feed from a continuously filled feed trough, turn around to a drinking fountain, drop their eggs on the inclined wire floor. The eggs roll outside through an automatic counter onto a conveyor belt that takes them to a human sorter who puts them in boxes. Another conveyor belt takes away the droppings. One man can easily take care of 7,000 birds with an output of 4,000 eggs a day. Outside each cage is the laying record. When this drops, the hen goes to the stewing pot.
Amiable Conceit. Not many years ago, most chickens sold in markets were either worn-out hens, roosters, or scrawny cockerels. Now most market chickens are grown only for eating, the result of a genetics race between supermarkets and specialty stores to provide the best eating bird. The meat-type chicken is never referred to by the industry simply as a chicken. It is too much of an all-purpose bird. With its plump breast and slim shanks, at less than a pound, it can be sold as a squab. At a pound it is widely sold as a Rock Cornish game hen (the game hen is an amiable conceit, but it does have Plymouth Rock and Cornish strains among its ancestors). At 2 Ibs. it is a broiler; at 3 Ibs. it is a fryer. Above 3 Ibs. a painless, chemical desexing of the cockerels yields roasting capons, sometimes called caponettes, weighing up to 6 Ibs.
Out of the race to produce the best eating bird two leaders emerged: Charles Vantress, 46, with headquarters at Duluth, Ga., who raises about 3,000,000 roosters a year; and Henry Saglio, 47, who raises 15 million hens at Arbor Acres, his farm near Glastonbury, Conn. They sell the chickens to the hatchery men, who use them to breed the chicks, which in turn are sold to the broiler men to raise for the market. Of the nearly 2 billion chickens that are turned out for eating every year, Vantress' roosters sire 75%; Saglio's hens mother about 50% of the total.
Mating by Tabulator. Both Vantress and Saglio approach their work with one goal: to get a bird that will eat the least amount of feed, grow the fastest, dress out to a completely standard bird with a minimum of waste. Thanks chiefly to this breeding, in 20 years the time and feed needed to raise a 3-lb. chicken for market have dropped from 14 weeks and 12 Ibs. of feed to 8 1/2weeks and 6| 3/4 Ibs. The five-year goal: a 3-lb. chicken in six weeks.
Nothing is allowed to impede the pursuit of perfection. Vantress discards any rooster whose offspring have high combs --a low comb means less slaughterhouse waste. Each half ounce that Vantress raises the dressing-out weight puts $30 million in the pockets of his customers. With an equal devotion to his job, Saglio recently decided that keeping chicken pedigrees in card indexes along with millions of measurement records involved the possibility of missing some choice genetic combinations. Now an IBM machine tabulates information on his birds. Tba machine decides which breeding rooster should go with which breeding hen.
50,000 a Day. To take advantage of such computer-like efficiency requires a high degree of automation and integration by the broiler men who buy the breeding stock. In Gainesville, Ga., Jesse Jewell, Inc. operates what it believes is the largest integrated chicken business in the world (TIME, Jan. 14, 1952). Buying Vantress roosters and hens from a New Hampshire breeder, Jewell hatches the eggs, sends the chicks out to 270 contract farmers in a 55-mile radius. The chicken houses are so thoroughly automated that one farmer can look after two houses, each containing 18,000 chickens. The feeding is entirely automatic: a conveyor belt with cleats dribbles the mash out in front of the chickens. About all the farmer must do is see that no thieves or foxes get in.
When the birds reach market weight, Jewell sends a truck to get them--and to deliver more baby birds. At his processing plant in Gainesville it takes only 60 minutes to bleed, scald, pluck and eviscerate, separate the birds into parts. Once separated into bins, the parts are put back together, without regard to which bird they came from originally, to make a package of standard weight. He processes 50,000 birds a day, has his own trucks distributing them all over the South and the Midwest, and as far as San Francisco, from where many are shipped frozen to Honolulu.
Showers for Pigs. The indoor life cycle of the chickens forecasts the future, for all farm animals. Purdue University has a $700,000 climate-control program in which, among other things, pigs take regular shower baths. Says Animal Science Professor Frederick N. Andrews: "Pigs do not wallow in mud because they like to be dirty. They wallow in mud because they have no sweat glands to keep them cool." With daily or even hourly shower baths, meticulous regulation of the temperature, humidity and even the air movement around them for each day of their lives, Purdue's hogs grow on less feed, gain 1 3/4 Ibs. per day, compared to 1 1/2 Ibs. for hogs forced to put up with natural weather.
Purdue has also brought sheep indoors.
Not only do the sheep seem to be happier but Purdue can regulate the amount of light they get. Normally, sheep breed only once a year, when the autumn days begin to shorten. By changing the lighting indoors, Purdue can make sheep think it is autumn any time of the year, get two or more lamb crops, schedule spring lamb around the calendar.
Cradle to Grave. U.S. manufacturers are turning out fully automated cages designed with the idea of giving each animal precision comfort.
Ranger Equipment Co. is on the market with the Porkliner, claims that with $112,000 worth of its equipment one man can raise 7,000 hogs a year with only half-day help. The Pork-liner is a hog's country club. The little pigs begin with private rooms, to avoid being stepped on by the sow. A hydraulic lift is used to stack the cages six rows high. Manure falls through the cage bottoms and is mechanically removed to be used as fertilizer. In their whole lives, until they are made into ham, sausages and bacon, the hogs never know weight-killing struggle.
Such confinement and automation of animals is possible and profitable because of a raft of new chemical discoveries. In 1948 Purdue's Dr. Andrews discovered how to put tiny pellets of stilbestrol, a synthetic female sex hormone, under the skins of cattle and sheep to make them gain weight 15% faster. Today 80% of the nation's beef cattle get stilbestrol. This helps farmers produce an estimated billion pounds more meat than they could have got for the same amount of feed without stilbestrol.
The antibiotics industry has also produced spectacular ideas. Only a few years ago, Chas. Pfizer & Co. was dumping the residue of its streptomycin fermentation vats in the Wabash River. Then Pfizer and other antibiotics companies found that the residue contained vitamin B12, a powerful growth stimulant. Once, B-12 was extracted from animal livers for humans and sold for thousands of dollars an ounce. Now Pfizer sells the B-12-rich residue cheaply to feed companies, which put it into animal rations. Merck & Co. and others have synthesized gibberellic acid, which has a powerful growth-stimulating effect on plants. Minute traces in spray will make spinach grow a second crop, and double the size of seedless grapes.
Perhaps the most imaginative of all animal researchers is J. Rockefeller Prentice, son of the chicken pioneer. Rockefeller Prentice has brought to commercial perfection the technique of quick freezing (at 320DEG below zero) the semen of prize beef bulls, flying it anywhere in the U.S.--or the world.
To give stock raisers the benefit of superb sires at low cost, Prentice has a bull donor service. In a pasture, one bull may cover only 20 to 35 cows a year. Prentice divides the semen, thus enables a bull to service up to 20,000 cows. He has one bull that has fathered 118,000 calves. Others long since dead are still siring calves. But he is not stopping there.
The technique of artificial insemination helps a farmer with poor herds to upbreed his herd only by slow stages. To speed the process, Prentice experimented with the technique of artificially inseminating a prize cow, surgically removing the fertilized egg, and implanting it in a scrub cow, which merely acts as a live incubator. The calf that is born is a prize animal with none of its mother's bad blood line. Scientists see a time when a farmer will buy a packet of fertilized ova, and in one year obtain from his scrub cows a herd of the finest cattle. To obtain the eggs in sufficient numbers, the donor cows would be fed hormones to make them super-ovulate. Formidable cost problems must be faced before the experimental process is commercially possible. Another big obstacle may turn out to be the purebred beef cattle associations. They already object to Prentice's selling a service of semen for $5 (plus a $5 vet's fee for injection). The associations say there is a danger slip-ups could blur purebred lines. The real reason, says Prentice, is that cattlemen want to preserve their market for high stud fees.
Fewer Farms. Where all this is leading to is obvious to farm experts. The number of farmers will steadily drop as more mechanization and automation increase the investment needed to farm. Economists of the Department of Agriculture estimate that the 3,100,000 commercial farms of 1954 may well be 2,000,000 by 1975. But they see rising prices for land and even used equipment making it easy for farmers to sell out at good prices. Those who stay in will have bigger markets. In 1940 each U.S. farmer fed himself and ten others. He now feeds 20 others. In 1975 experts expect it will be about 42. Increasing agricultural efficiency will make the job easier and more profitable.
Whether the U.S. can much longer afford the huge surpluses being piled up by this efficiency is doubted by most farm experts. Even if the support scandal continues, there is something for U.S. taxpayers to be cheerful about. Rising efficiency keeps down the cost of food. The mountainous grain surplus currently is causing a build-up in cattle-breeding--pointing to an eventual price break.
For the world, the enormous success of Farmer North and thousands like him may be even more significant. The new methods have proved just as successful abroad as in the U.S. For example, in England, Farmer Anthony Fisher tried his hand at dairying. After his herd died of foot-and-mouth disease he was about ready to quit. Hearing about the U.S. system of raising broilers, he wrote to Ralston Purina Co. to get free brochures on how to do it. He started out with 200 birds. Now his output has grown to 1,000,000 a year. The broiler king of England, he has one packing plant, plans another to process his chickens and those of his imitators. The broiler is fast becoming as cheap and popular in England as in the U.S. Thus the new methods of mechanization and automation developed by the U.S. farmer can show the world how to solve the food shortages brought on by the explosion in population. In the next decade, the most important U.S. export may well be the lessons that Farmer North and others learned down on the farm.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.